Field of the Invention and Related Art Statement
The present invention relates to a medical image filing apparatus.
Recently, as to a medical treatment system, there has been proposed an image filing system in which clinical images such as endoscope images, X-ray images, microscope images of pathological specimens, etc. of various patients are filed under the control of a computer, and such an image filing system has been used for a diagnosis and a management of case histories. In the medical image filing apparatus mentioned above, many clinical images taken in clinical diagnoses are recorded together with indexes having address data representing filing positions of the images in a record medium and retrieval data including a plurality of keywords such as name of patient, sex distinction, birthday, date of diagnosis, name of disease, part of disease, name of doctor in charge, etc. When retrieval data is inputted from a keyboard, the recorded clinical images are collated with the retrieval data and one or more clinical images having retrieval data identical with the inputted retrieval data are retrieved and are successively displayed on a display unit.
Further, when the doctor diagnoses a patient with reference to his clinical images, it is sometimes necessary to see one or more case images of related disease for reference in order to perform an accurate diagnosis. However, in the known medical image filing apparatus, only the clinical images taken by the actual diagnoses are recorded on the record medium, and the case images or reference images of diseases are not recorded. In this case, there occurs the drawback that it is necessary to find necessary case images from a great number of case images described on books.